This Article Is About Pocketpair's Uniquely Questionable Game Dev Practices

Disclaimer: Please read the entire article first, especially the concluding section. You can crucify me afterward if you want, especially for any mistakes I made in the article.

 

Update (9/7/2026): Pocketpair announced that they are planning to fully release Craftopia next year. I don't plan to write an article about this, but I wanted to acknowledge that this announcement happened. In terms of what I wanted Pocketpair to do in my Closing Thoughts section, the current 1.0 plan, which is fairly vague and lacks a definitive roadmap, does not fulfill my demand for Pocketpair to "properly finish the development of Craftopia". Their announcement is even harder to take seriously when considering that the 6th anniversary update, which was a great opportunity to start their stated goal of refining and polishing the game, just added a tiny amount of content instead. I left a comment expressing my skepticism at whether they can even achieve what they're planning in a significant, meaningful way by 2027. Finally, it's worrying how many replies simply take the announcement at face value; I wish I had the optimism those posters have. Aside from that, I fixed up this article by addressing some spelling and grammar errors and improving the clarity of some statements to better convey my points.

 

Recently, Palworld received its 1.0 update, officially exiting Early Access after about 2.5 years. The developer, Pocketpair, announced their intention to fully release the game last year and announced a date roughly one month before the full release.

While this release is not surprising and seems to be heavily celebrated based on the reviews and comments on various news announcements for the game, I'm personally a little upset. This is because Pocketpair is also the game developer of Craftopia, a game I naïvely pointed to as a potentially decent open world-esque alternative when discussing the game design issues of Genshin Impact. While some great open world games did fully release (or are at least near full release) later on, Craftopia has instead languished in Early Access for nearly 6 years.

Around when Palworld entered Early Access, I played Craftopia, then I played Palworld itself a few months later. While I had fun playing both games and saw their potential, I was ultimately frustrated and concerned by how much worse off the former game was despite how much longer it had been in development. Because I was aware of Pocketpair's history regarding how they handled their first game, Overdungeon, which I will explain in further detail later, I started to gather information about the company. The results of this research deepened my outrage, but I reasoned that Craftopia's development would surge forward by leaps and bounds with the new revenue from Palworld's success. Therefore, I shelved what I learned in the form of an article draft on this blog and hoped I'd never have to make use of the information.

 

Unfortunately, Palworld has now fully released before Craftopia has even left the alpha state of development by the developer's own admission. Furthermore, Pocketpair has intentions to release more games and while they definitely have the staff to support such projects, it's unusual and concerning that the future of their second oldest game remains uncertain.

 

I believe Pocketpair's game development practices are uniquely questionable to the point that more people should scrutinize and criticize them. This article will attempt to accomplish that by laying out the facts I've gathered along with my interpretations of that evidence. I will then address counterpoints made by fans, including potential future ones, and explain why Pocketpair's practices are problematic, particularly in the broader sense of affecting the gaming industry as a whole.

Granblue Fantasy: Relink Suggestion Compilation, With New Foreword and Afterword

Disclaimer: No, I didn't steal this. Max Depravity is another alias I use. I even took the rare step of posting the Google Doc on Reddit under my usual username.

 

7/10/26: I fixed the Afterword a bit to clarify my points better.

Foreword

 

As I mentioned in my last article, I'm reposting my Granblue Fantasy: Relink suggestion compilation to this blog to better preserve it and I wanted to do it before the upcoming expansion, Endless Ragnarok, releases. I had to paste the content of the entire Google Doc without formatting, then re-add the formatting to properly work with this blog. I fixed some mistakes such as bad grammar and missing words, but the actual suggestions themselves have not been changed. Also, I had the misfortune of learning most header formats don't work properly due to my blog theme, so I'm only using Major Header and resizing text for section and subsection titles like I used to do.

 

As for the suggestions themselves, I think they as a whole are still solid even a couple of years later. However, I should have acknowledged the influence of more games on my suggestions. For example, the Boss Rush suggestion was definitely influenced by Hades and similar roguelite games. Meanwhile, Rogue Mode Exploration and Expeditions also drew inspiration from games such as Risk of Rain 2.

 

What follows is the original contents of my suggestion compilation with the fixes I mentioned. Also, for those who are curious, Cygames was accepting feedback on Relink and I did send them the entire Google Doc as my feedback shortly after posting it on Reddit.

 

Improving Genshin Impact, Master's Thesis Edition

About a year and a half ago, an upcoming game caught my interest due to comparisons being made between it and Breath of the Wild. As someone who liked that game but recognized that it was far from perfect and could be improved upon in many ways, I wondered what this game would be like and how it would improve upon the game that clearly served as its source of inspiration. As I've already made clear in past articles, the fact that the game was releasing on mobile was not an issue for me. Such a concern was also dampened by the fact that the game was also going to be released on PC and as it turns out, the game eventually released on mobile, PC, and PS4.

However, while the game made a solid first impression, I rapidly noticed potential content design issues that made the Warlords of Draenor expansion for World of Warcraft seem good by comparison. Unfortunately, as I progressed through the game, these concerns were sadly confirmed and I became annoyed that yet another game fell into the trap of using what I consider to be flawed game design philosophy since it tries to make player miserable to generate profit more than it tries to make players happy to generate profit. Such concerns, which I will go into more detail on below, were echoed by critics and players alike.

Many months and numerous arguments with fellow players later, it has become apparent that miHoYo, the company behind the game, seems more or less content with how their game is designed. While some meaningful content has been developed and released, much of it is rife with arbitrary limitations. In fact, the repeatable content that the game has to offer, especially for endgame players, has largely remained unchanged and still involves waiting for at least a few hours or the expenditure of money to meaningfully engage in. This factor among others has me worried about this game that I want to like, but clearly needs improvements. Therefore, in this article I will be providing an extensive list of suggestions to resolve what I believe to be problematic about the game.

However, before getting into the meat of the article, I want to address why I'm suddenly writing a Genshin Impact article instead of writing more articles on World of Warcraft. To put it simply, I'm on a break from World of Warcraft and I'm unsure if I'll be playing the game again any time soon. The reasons why are largely similar to the ones I made in the article on why I wouldn't be playing Classic WoW. However, I still have topics I want to write articles on and an article about a game that has content design issues similar to some past iterations of World of Warcraft seems like a good place to start, so without further ado...